In a sedate New Brunswick town, a dozen lives collide unexpectedly. From acclaimed playwright Don Hannah comes Canada's version of the Southern novel--a bountiful story of skewed family relationships and thwarted love, told with tenderness, humanity and delicious hilarity.

Don Hannah is a playwright and novelist who lives in Toronto and Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia. He was the inaugural Lee Playwright-in-Residence at the University of Alberta where he wrote While Weâ??re Young. In 2008, he directed his play There is a Land of Pure Delight at Live Bait Theatre in New Brunswick. As a dramaturge, he has worked with playwrights from across the country, and for five years was on the faculty of the Banff Playwrights Colony. His books include Shoreline, a collection of his plays, and the novel, Ragged Islands, which received the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize.

Don Hannah's profile page

"Beautiful— moving." —The Globe and Mail

"The Wise and Foolish Virgins, like Fall on Your Knees, is the real thing, a finely crafted, genuinely moving novel that does, indeed, introduce a writer with an original and engaging voice.... Hannah shows us that even the most unrequited life has value and possibility. He makes us care about his lonely characters and care as much as they do about the smallest, simplest pleasures: from a solitary stolen kiss to a drive in the country. The Wise and Foolish Virgins is an impressive debut." —Quill & Quire
"Hannah, an award-winning dramatist, writes like a born novelist, with a calm, seductive style and an almost Chekovian vision of subtle humour and generosity.... Despite its tragic undertones, the book has the sweetly elegiac mood of a long summer evening." —Maclean's
"A rich, beautifully composed portrait of a small town.... [A] novel that takes its time and assumes that readers want to be told a story." —R.M. Vaughan, Xtra!
"The Wise and Foolish Virgins is a lovely novel that poses fundamental questions about forgiveness.... Hannah writes daringly about people who have misshapen and tortured lives; he writes about them with spicy humour, and a compassionate understanding for their failings." —The Financial Post
"Don Hannah writes in a voice that is as natural as breathing, and his ambitious first novel is both compassionate and fully realized. The Wise and Foolish Virgins is imbued with a rare generosity for the profound yearnings that animate small-town life." —Carole Corbeil, author Voice-Over and In the Wings
"Don Hannah displays a rare combination of sympathy and talent in his first novel. The language is simple, the feeling intimate. Above all, there is an aura of authenticity about the characters and their world. It is part of Hannah's gift that the reader is wiling to suspend belief and follow the characters out of the shadows and into the light, where there is hope." —The Canadian Press